The History Boys: War Horse and The Adventures of Tintin

It often seems that there are two Steven Spielbergs—the master entertainer who gave us E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial and Indiana Jones, and the director of such award-worthy films as Saving Private Ryan and Munich. Sometimes both Spielbergs appear in the same year, like back in 1993 when he made both Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List, surely some sort of record for the most dissimilar movies ever released by a Hollywood filmmaker in a six-month period. And he’s doing it again in 2011. Over the next five days, he’s bringing out two films that could hardly seem less alike: War Horse, a tear-jerking World War I story likely to be up for Best Picture, and the giddy romp that is The Adventures of Tintin.

Based on a children’s novel by Michael Morpurgo that was adapted into a hit play, War Horse unfolds with the simplicity of a fable. Newcomer Jeremy Irvine stars as Albert, a young man who lives on a struggling farm with his salt-of-the-earth mother (Emily Watson) and feckless boozer of a father (Peter Mullan). Albert’s one joy in life is Joey, a brave and beautiful horse whom he loves like a brother. But when the First World War breaks out, Joey’s sold to the British Army and sent to France. From there, the vicissitudes of battle carry this marvelous creature from one owner to another, including the sensitive Captain Nichols (a touchingly fine Tom Hiddleston), two AWOL young German soldiers (David Kross and Leonhard Carow), and an orphaned French girl (Celine Buckens) sheltered by her grandfather (Niels Arestrup). Meanwhile, Albert can’t wait to be shipped to the battlefront so he can find his beloved Joey. And does he? Even those born yesterday will know the answer to that one.

War Horse is not what you’d call sophisticated storytelling, but people who saw it onstage found it magical because of the dazzling puppetry that brought Joey to life. Naturally, Spielberg couldn’t use puppets—movies demand real horses—which meant he had to find a new source of magic. And so he’s directed the movie in a style that harks nostalgically back to an earlier era of Hollywood filmmaking, recalling 1940s pictures like How Green Was My Valley and National Velvet. While this gives War Horse a patina of strikingly old-fashioned beauty, it also makes much of the movie feel hokey and overblown. It’s not merely that Albert’s love for Joey is made so childishly pure that he seems, frankly, rather dim. Nor is it that John Williams’s bombastic score keeps telling you what to feel before you have a chance to feel it. It’s that, like so much of Spielberg’s work, it doesn’t merely gild the emotional lily but encrusts it with zircons.

Now, this doesn’t keep Spielberg from achieving moments of genuine power. Indeed, I haven’t seen a more primally wrenching scene this year than the terrified Joey galloping through the fences in No Man’s Land and being dragged down by all the barbed wire that binds him. Merely writing about it fills me with pain. While this scene can’t redeem all of the movie’s failings, it does possess a terrible beauty that sears itself into your mind. War Horse is not a great film, but there are glimpses of greatness within it. You’ll remember Joey’s agony—and grandeur—long after you’ve forgotten the fields of corniness that surround it.

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Photo: Courtesy of Paramount Pictures

When Orson Welles first visited a Hollywood studio, he called it “the biggest electric-train set a boy ever had.” It’s in this same playful spirit that Spielberg has made The Adventures of Tintin, a retro boy’s escapade which employs 3-D and motion-capture animation to create a movie positively exhausting in its inventiveness.

Based on the famous series of comic books by the Belgian cartoonist Hergé, the movie is a freewheeling yarn about Tintin, nicely voiced by Jamie Bell, a boyish reporter who never goes anywhere without his loyal (and brainy) dog, Snowy, who often turns up to save the day. This particular adventure begins when Tintin buys a ship in a bottle that turns out to contain a secret message sought by the sinister Ivanovich Sakharine (Daniel Craig), who believes it contains the historical key to boundless glory. Before they know it, Tintin and Snowy are working side by side with the braying, alcoholic Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis) and tearing around the globe to stop Sakharine’s insidious plans.

Tintin isn’t exactly bursting with human complexity, and if you’re like me, you’ll probably find the story boring. (After about the tenth gag having to do with Captain Haddock’s drinking, I was about ready to go on the wagon myself.) But it also offers the chance to see one of the world’s great directors (and Spielberg is surely that) working in a form that allows him almost total imaginative freedom: You see the worlds he’d like to create if not overly constrained by material reality. And the result is some of the giddiest sequences you’ll ever witness on land, sea, or air, culminating in a breathtakingly baroque chase down a Moroccan mountainside, with Tintin and Snowy racing down roads and across rooftops with each moment of apparent escape unleashing only more danger and more chaos, as if the entire world had been designed by Rube Goldberg. One of the least sentimental pictures Spielberg has ever made, The Adventures of Tintin is not a movie to analyze or reflect on or feel deeply about. It’s a movie to watch.